Customer satisfaction with online retail supplies has fallen, despite a healthy rise in internet shopping over Christmas 2004, according to a new report by US analysts eMarketer.
New research for the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), from ForeSee results, finds that consumer satisfaction with e-commerce has declined from a score of 80.8 in 2003 to an index of rating of 78.6 in 2004, representing a 2.7% decline.
E-retail experienced the strongest drop out of all e-commerce categories, with a decline of 4.8% between 2003 and last year. Online auctions, travel and brokerages also lost favour with consumers, displaying loses in customer satisfaction throughout the year.
ForeSee attribute this drop to several reasons. The first is that expansion of companies like Amazon has lead to brand dilution, with Amazon increasingly working with different companies to offer a myriad of products beyond books and CDs, ForeSee argue that this could be confusing for customers.
The second reason for the decline in customer satisfaction with e-retail is that since the development of the internet as an important consumer channel, customers have greater expectations for the shopping medium.
There is no evidence, however, that this research is deterring UK online shopping customers, with research released in January by global research agency, Millward Brown, revealing that the UK is leading Europe in terms of shopping habits, with over a quarter of UK consumers spending more than £1000 online during 2004 (see UK Leads Europe In Online Spending).
eMarketer argues that today’s online shopper is ‘multi-channel’, resulting in retailers needing to address this issue via advertising. In its recent ‘Online Consumer Selling Report’ the US analyst reveal that many retailers fall short of fully exploiting the opportunity due to technology hurdles , organisational resistance and short-term thinking (see Advertisers Must Look To Multi-Channel Marketing).
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